This vibrantly illustrated introduction to the emerging field of the preservation and presentation of media art brings together the contributions of authors from all over Europe and the United States. This volume can serve as a textbook for students in advanced degree programs in media art and museum studies, as well as an invaluable introduction for general readers. A potent combination of incisive scholarly articles and focused case studies, Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art offers a comprehensive overview of the history, theory, and practical skills of preserving media art.

canon of filmic language ever since. An explicit focus on the viewer of a performance, however, is also not entirely new; it can be found in Par desmit minutem vecaks / 10 minutes older (1978, Herz Frank) as well as in more recent works of video and film art such as Teatro Amazonas (1999) by Sharon Lockhart and Shirin (2008) by Abbas Kiarostami. In March 1969, the Boston television station WGBH broadcast a program titled The Medium is the Medium. It was the first television show to have been

practices. M edia A estheti c s | 95 Notes 1 A symptom of the actuality of this issue is Jacques Rancière’s recent book (2011). 2 Theodor Adorno: “The idea of a value-free aesthetics is nonsense” (1999: 262). 3 Made for his 2006 exhibition Voyage(s) en utopie at the Pompidou Center in Paris. 4 According to Jürgen Habermas (1987), it was Hegel who introduced philosophical reflexivity, so founding modern thought. 5 See Clement Greenberg’s possibly most famous essay, “Modernist

technicians, programmers, and engineers the VMN approach tries to establish a better understanding of how the work should evolve and be handled over time in order to preserve its ephemeral character: “A questionnaire [stimulates] responses that will help to understand the artists’ intent. The questionnaire is not a sociological survey, but an instrument for determining how artists would like their work to be re-created in the future – if at all. […] The results of the questionnaire, the variable

reasons, were not realized, and possibilities that were not tested. It is clear that, with respect to the vast and rich documentation that can be collected in this case, one must make a selection: some of the material gathered, if left unexplained, may be misleading in the future, precisely because it relates to working hypotheses that, for one reason or another, were abandoned by the artist during the development of the work in favor of others that were effectively realized. So here, too, it is